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The financial sector isn't the powerhouse of the UK economy. It's more like a Wendy house

HMRC figures show a drastic reduction in Corporation Tax contributions since the financial crash – on average just £3.3billion a year, even when the paltry Bank Levy is included. To put this in context, the finance sector shelled out £14 billion in bonuse

Five years ago today, following a frantic weekend of negotiations, during which Alistair Darling later admitted cash machines were within hours of being switched off, the Government announced that British banks would be part-nationalised to stave off collapse. We bought an 82% stake in RBS and 40% in Lloyds/HBOS at a combined cost of £37 billion.

It was part of a wider bailout package which cost £132.89 billion of public money – the equivalent of £2,000 from each man, woman and child in the UK. Former Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King quipped a year later: "To paraphrase a great wartime leader, never in the field of financial endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many.”

Half a decade later and the situation has changed little. According to the most up-to-date figures from the National Audit Office, £118.86 billion (or 89 per cent) of the original bailout is still outstanding. The interest payments alone cost the public purse £5 billion a year. Whilst some of the costs are recouped through the Government charging banks interest and fees, the NAO estimates it has still amounted to “a transfer of at least £5 billion from taxpayers to the financial sector” since the crisis.

There are others reasons the many are still propping up the few. Take for instance the 'too-big-to-fail' subsidy, whereby banks can borrow money cheaply because creditors know the Government (read: taxpayer) will bail them out if things go wrong. It's worth a fortune - £235 billion to Britain's four biggest banks between 2008-2011, according to research by the New Economics Foundation.

Or look at financial service's incongruous exemption from VAT. It's understandable that some items are VAT-free, for example: children's clothes, public transport, medical and funeral costs; but why are we exempting the services of a derivatives trader? According to HMRC itself, this anomaly costs us another £5bn a year. The International Monetary Fund has warned this special treatment of the banking sector means it is under-taxed and has allowed it to grow “too large”.

Banks have also become adept at gobbling up public money intended for the real economy. This not only artificially inflates their profit and pay, but acts as a tourniquet on growth. Despite having drawn down £17.6bn since the Funding for Lending Scheme began just over a year ago, banks' lending to business contracted by £2.3bn.

The cumulative effect is that banks live in a welfare dependent bubble, cushioned from feeling the effects of the crisis they caused. Financial sector growth has far outstripped the rest of the economy since the crisis: in 2012 for example, if you take out the fines and the one-off costs of adjusting to regulatory changes, the profits of the five biggest banks' rose 45% to £31.5 billion. The economy virtually flat-lined during the same period.

Yet whilst the financial sector likes to think of itself as the powerhouse of the UK economy, in terms of the tax it pays, it's more of a Wendy house. HMRC figures show a drastic reduction in Corporation Tax contributions since the financial crash – on average just £3.3billion a year, even when the paltry Bank Levy is included. To put this in context, the finance sector shelled out £14 billion in bonuses to top staff last year alone.

Meanwhile, the public have paid in service cuts, job losses and tax rises. Government spending will be cut by 9.1%, £141bn in real terms, during the course of this Parliament, chronically impacting on the poorest who rely on services most. Whilst the top rate of tax was cut, giving millionaires a tax break, the VAT increase to 20% has been shown to hit the poorest 10 per cent of the population more than twice as hard as the richest 10 per cent.

This stark injustice has prompted other countries to take action. It is the explicit reason why Germany, France, Italy, Spain and seven other European countries are implementing the Financial Transaction Tax of between 0.1% - 0.01% on stocks, bonds and derivatives that will raise up to £30 billion. It is the only policy to have emerged post-crisis that will ensure those responsible pay to clean up the mess they caused.

Unfortunately, the UK Government has not only refused to join in, but has taken the proposal to the European Court of Justice. It's a worrying indictment of their priorities, compounded two weeks ago when they launched another legal challenge, this time against the EU banker bonus cap. This was followed by news that the Government is scrapping the 1 per cent pay rise due to NHS staff in April. As an example of misplaced priorities it is difficult to beat.

Unless of course you look at ministers’ treatment of the poorest – the bedroom tax, benefit cap and punitive sanctions for those who miss Job Centre appointments - these policies are all signs that the coalition is determined to end what they call ‘the something for nothing’ culture. It’s a shame they won’t apply the same logic to bankers.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.